Ghana climate talks advance on saving forests

The world has made progress on ways to save tropical forests and other elements of a planned U.N. pact to slow global warming, the U.N.'s top climate official said as 160-nation talks in Ghana ended on Wednesday.

"We are still on track, the process has speeded up," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said of the Aug. 21-27 negotiations, one of a series meant to end in Copenhagen in 2009 with a new U.N. pact.

"There is a growing sense of urgency," he told a news conference after the meeting of up to 1,500 delegates in Accra.

He said countries expressed widening commitment to plans to safeguard fast-disappearing tropical forests. Burning forests to clear land for farming emits about 20 percent of greenhouse gases from human activities.

"We cannot come to a meaningful solution on climate change without coming to grips with deforestation," he said. Plants soak up carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, as they ...